Because I have a bunch of new readers AND one of the biggest literary prizes was announced yesterday, I wanted to remind everyone here how I handle the announcement of award winners by reposting when I wrote about the Booker Prize back at the end of July here and below.
Here on RA for All, I am less about breaking news and more about how to help readers. There are plenty of sites that do breaking news, but very few who focus on how to use resources to best help your readers.
To that end, I focus on awards long and short lists-- the nominees. Why? Because what the award is for, who makes their nomination lists, and how the titles are chosen is a more helpful resource than just worrying about the winner.
As you can see below, I start each of these "Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool" posts with a header that directs you to the first post where I explain WHY the lists of nominees are your best resource. There is a while list there of how these lists can be helpful to you. Click through to see more, but again, it is always at the top of every "Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool" post so you don't have to remember where to go. My goal is to help you help your leisure readers and I try to make it as easy as possible for you to do that job. I know you have at least a dozen balls in the air at any one time (remember I did this for 15 years myself), and my job is to give you the resources and ideas you need with as few clicks as possible. And to get you the info you need in advance-- hence the focus on the linguists, not the winners.
Also, it is important to note that when you consider the nominees of an award in any given year (and the last 5 or so years in general) that you get better picture of the trends in that genre or area which the award considers. Understanding the big picture over time is often more helpful than knowing who the specific winners were.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 31, 2024
Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: The Booker Prize Edition
This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.
The Booker Prize Longlist was recently announced. What is the Booker Prize? From their About Page:
The Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades
Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. It is a prize that transforms the winner’s career.
Go here to access the titles, details about every book, information about the judges. And on the main page, there are even more articles about this year's longlist. I will also post them at the bottom of this post.
But even with the regular. display, backlist, and collection development advice I give for every award (access above), The Book Prize is an award you need to know about for a variety of reasons, reasons which give you even more options to serve your patrons.
First, these books are always among the top books written in English every year, which means this year and past year's lists make for reliable suggestions to your curious readers. The backlist is also very easy to access. In fact, they call it The Booker Library and it is bearable in every imaginable way.
Second, these titles (2024 or any year in the recent past) tend to be on the "readable side." What do I mean with that? What I mean is that they tend to pick excellent titles of high literary merit that are readable for a general adult audience. These are critically acclaimed, literary fiction titles that you can give out to a wide swath of readers with confidence. This year's longlist is a great example as Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars in on the list. It is a popular book with library patrons. I have read it as well and have suggested itwith confidence to many readers.
Third, the Booker Prize has a history of identifying authors worth you time early in their careers, sometimes earlier than they get singled out for other major awards. This year is no exception. Let's look at it from both sides of the equation. First, an author who is on the longlist this year, who had his mainstream breakout this year, but who has been nominated before, Percival Everett. He is on the longlist for James this year, but he was a finalist for The Trees previously. Use this link from the Booker Library to read more about Everett. Second, and the other side of the equation, the Booker often singles out debuts and this year is no exception with 3 debut novels on the list.
Fourth, this award list serves as a readalike for itself. Not all awards can do this, but I have used this award list as a suggestion engine for readers who have enjoyed any book that has appeared on the longlists. In fact, back in the early days of the 2000s, I offered a "Holds Without Hassle" program at my library, and not only did we allow them to pick authors for that list, but we also had a few awards they could select. This award (called the Man Booked back in the day) was one of the most popular choices. People wanted the winner put on automatic hold and then after reading it, we helped them find the other nominated titles. I have seen this work in action, even with the books being about widely different topics and from a range of authors.
Fifth, and this is how my readers first found out about this award in the first place, these titles make excellent book discussion choices. Again, there is a very helpful Booker Library, where you can find books by author, title, or even pick a prize year. And to make it even easier for you, they have Reading Guides designed specifically for libraries. Using the backlist from 2-5 years ago is a great resource for winning discussion titles.
And finally, the judges. I have talked about this before, but look at that list of judges from this year or past years. Take this year for example-- click here and scroll down. You can do this for any prize year. Go to the Book Library page by year and you will get a page that looks very much like the 2024 page with all of the judging info. The judges themselves are excellent options for displays, suggestions, and purchases if you don't own their books. You can also use the judges list as one of my 5 Resources You Cannot Live Without-- Author Recs of Other Authors. Recently, I wrote about how that works in relation to the NYT Best Books of the Century discussion.
I am sure there are even more reasons why this award is a great resource for you to help your readers. Click through for all of the details and information and decide how you can best use this list for your library. The site is really a treasure trove of resources, suggestions, and lists all year long. Here is the most basic info-- the titles on the long list:
The judges’ selection includes:
- Strong new voices – including three debut novels – alongside international bestselling authors and six writers previously nominated for the prize
- The first Dutch and first Native American authors to be longlisted, the first Australian in eight years, one British-Libyan writer, and authors from Canada, the UK, Ireland and the US
- A strong showing of Americans displays a range of experience, from a first-time novelist to the author of more than 20 novels
- Blackly comic page-turners, multigenerational epics, meditations on the pain of exile – plus a crime caper, a spy thriller, an unflinching account of girls’ boxing and a reimagining of a 19th-century classic
- Eight women and five men
- The first nomination for Pan Macmillan imprint Mantle, and four nominations for Jonathan Cape, in the imprint’s first longlisting since 2019
- ‘Works of fiction that inhabit ideas by making us care deeply about people and their predicaments,’ according to Chair of judges Edmund de Waal, who adds that these are works that have ‘made a space in our hearts and that we want to see find a place in the reading lives of many others’
No comments:
Post a Comment